


i don’t believe in god, but i believe in this

by swingingparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, F/F, Gen, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Meta As Fuck Dude, The Horrorterrors (Homestuck), hey guys guess who my favorite hs character is on three, it’s very vague but it’s there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:42:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23510266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swingingparty/pseuds/swingingparty
Summary: She has dreams where she’s a god. She has dreams where she spins the framework of the universe on her fingertips like a basketball. She wakes from these exhilarated, ecstatic, ready for more.
Relationships: Rose Lalonde & Dave Strider, Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Comments: 12
Kudos: 31





	i don’t believe in god, but i believe in this

**Author's Note:**

> IT IS 3 IN THE MORNING! anyways rose lalonde is one of the best things to come out of homestuck i cannot communicate my love for her character enough and this doesn’t even come close to doing her arc justice but HERE you go anyways.....mwah title is from evil eye by franz ferdinand btw!

Rose’s first memory is of the waterfall.

It’s also one of her clearest memories of her mother sober; in this, she sees the older woman as cheerful, effervescent, like the light shining behind a bank of storm clouds, the veritable silver lining. In the memory, it’s the dead of winter, and the ground around them is covered in snow, piles rising far above Rose’s head as she and her mother wander around the grounds. Rose clings to her mother’s hands, small stubby fingers interlocking with the larger, slender ones in a gesture of childish complacency, a trust existing between them that will fragment and fracture and shatter into a billion jagged pieces before this time next year. Rose will learn the meaning of nativity before she can even spell the word, and she will trade blind hand-holding for jamming her fists deep in her pockets, dragging her nails rhythmically along her legs as her mother half-staggers beside her, now embodying the storm clouds more than the light behind them. Soon, the walks themselves will be traded for a rigid separation, irrevocable lines in the sand; a war of wills will erupt, with Rose championing the banner of deep-set mistrust and perceived insincerity, and her mother with her slurred phrases and desperate attempts to reconcile with the girl living on the other side of the house.

It, like so many wars Rose will fight in, will be bitter, bloody, and pointless. It will end in stalemate, each side caught between the heady burn of victory and the lacerating edge of defeat.

But that is not the story now. The story is the waterfall and the wind and the snow and the flash of pink that streams behind them as Rose and her mother walk to the edge of the platform.

The spray is harsh, stinging, and Rose leans into her mother for protection against the spray. A hand cards through her hair; a silence falls over the two of them, and they stand and watch.

“It’s so big,” Rose says finally; she has yet to develop the vocabulary that will give her the ability to communicate just how small standing by the waterfall makes her feel, but the simple feeling will be seared into the back of her brain until then.

“Yeah,” her mother agrees, uncharacteristically non-verbal. Rose is unable to scrutinize the expression on the woman’s face; she thinks it looks a little bit like wonder. Like longing. She’s too young to fully understand what it means to look at the sheer abyss of jagged cliff faces and ice-cold spray like that, but it, too, will take up stock in the back of her mind until she can. Until she’s seven and gotten her hands on an untouched, unused copy of the DSM-V from a cardboard box in the corner of her garage; until she’s eight and sitting in the waiting room of a hospital, head spinning from the permeating scent sterilization, legs still not long enough to touch the floor; until she’s nine and standing by the fire, dramatically backlit in a way she would love if not for the fact that she’s watching her mother sob her lungs out on the couch, face pressed so deep into the upholstery that she almost doesn’t hear her say: “I’m a fucking drunk, Rosie. A motherfucking alcoholic.”

So much hinges on the almost. That’s another thing she finds herself learning. And it takes her years to let someone else call her Rosie; even then, she still finds herself flinching on the rare occasion, looking around in panic, half-expecting to see shaking shoulders and discarded wine bottles and snow piling up against windows.

She’s eight and her cat dies and she can’t make herself get out of bed for a week. Her mother is mysteriously absent this entire period, and Rose can’t bring herself to care much. She is learning the dynamic opening up between them more and more ever day; her mother is unable to be a mother, and Rose is unable to let herself settle into the role of a daughter. She cuts all her hair off and pierces her own ears and threatens to run away or jump off the cliff face when her mother insists they’re opening a mausoleum for Jaspers. She’s being mocked, and she knows it, and she hates it. She stands in the rain for hours on the day of the funeral and catches a cold the next morning. She wonder if genuineness was just something her mother was never born with, or if the years of alcohol consumption dried whatever resource of it she had up. She decide she don’t want to know the answer.

Sometimes Rose feel it’s her fault, the drinking. Sometimes she wish she had never been born in the hopes that maybe, maybe her mother would just finally be happy.

She’s ten when she understands what it means to long for the waterfall. It’s winter again—or maybe the seasons have never changed; there is something about Rainbow Falls that seems so rigid and unchanging, like it’s dug its heels in against the very nature of time itself. But this time, she’s alone, dressed in a too-big, dark purple coat she bought when the weather started changing and one of her mother’s scarves. The wind buffets her from side to side, a hairline away from sending her flying into the water as she stands at the edge, looking down. Though there’s no one around to see should her mask crack and fall, even just for a second, Rose is careful to keep her features arranged into a look of steely boredom, as if challenging whatever powers that be to come down and make her feel something. Behind that, the sound of the vacuum roving around the empty living room, her mother unconscious somewhere on the couch plays on loop, the whirring setting her teeth inexplicably on edge. There had been no reason for her mother to clean up; two people who stick to the tiny parts of the house they’ve carved out for themselves—Rose and her bedroom and her mother and the living room—create exceedingly little mess, and yet her mother had insisted on cleaning up anyways. She had been on her third martini of the night, and Rose had stood in her now-familiar place by the fire, watching with the same rigidly controlled expression as the scene unfolded. After a while, the sight had made her nose start to sting inexplicably, so she grabbed her coat and headed to where she is now. Staring down at the waterfall, and understanding her mother just a little bit more. It would be nice, she reasons, blinking back tears she’ll later insist to herself were caused by the wind and the spray alone, but it’d be a cheap way out. By now, her DSM-V is battered and dog-eared, pages worn thin from being leaked through time after time, and Rose knows what will happen if she lets herself give into fantasies like that. Besides, someone needs to buy the groceries answer the doorbell and turn off the vacuums when her mother can’t; who else can fulfill that role but her?

So she steps away and heads back up the path to the house, gritting her teeth against the cold. Even from this far away, with the light on in the living room looking nothing more than a glowing speck against the walls of ice and snow that surround her house, she swears she can still hear the vacuum.

She’s eleven and back at the hospital again. The doctors are saying it was a close call, her heart almost stopped, it’s a miracle we got there when we did, is there someone we can call and Rose shakes her head because she’s been in this position time and time again by now, knows the exact route home from here—by bus and by foot—should she need to leave and when she sits in the hard-backed plastic chairs in the waiting room her feet touch the floor now, so she’s old and she’s grown-up and she doesn’t need the doctors to call someone for her; reliance on such a support network would be, to her, both foolish and a fallacy on her part. She is eleven and smart enough to be in eighth grade and now knows the meaning of naivety. Naivety is expecting change, naivety is hoping she will never have to spend hours in the shower scrubbing the smell of hospital out of her hair, naivety is calling someone for help. So she shakes her head and digs her nails into the side of the styrofoam cup of water in her hand and waits for her mother to wake up.

Sometimes, she has dreams where she’s covered in blood—blue, jade, candy-red. Sometimes she sees a cue ball floating, just out of reach despite her attempts to grab it, and always awakens with the distinctive sensation that she’s being mocked. Sometimes she has dreams where she can no longer speak, where the world goes black and red and purple all over, where she hollows out, an unknowable bitterness washing away whatever structural framing held her together beforehand. Sometimes she has dreams where she dies, over and over again, and wakes up with salt on her lips and her breath rasping in the back of her throat. She diagnoses her mother with every disorder in the book, sits in the center of the mausoleum for Jaspers for hours, writes until her fingers are raw to shake herself out of these dreams. More often than not, they start feeling real, less like dreams and more like slivers of her future, or a possible future. Her mother holds a party and the treasured living room couch gets trashed; Rose orders a new one the next day. She skips school because it is so endlessly boring and she’s half-convinced at this point that no one can teach her anything she can’t learn on her own. She wants to be a writer, a therapist, a psychologist, a mother.

She has dreams where she’s a god. She has dreams where she spins the framework of the universe on her fingertips like a basketball. She wakes from these exhilarated, ecstatic, ready for more.

More never comes. It snows so much she’s stuck inside for a week. The smell of alcohol follows her no matter where she goes.

She’s twelve when her mother checks herself into rehab. She’s still twelve, only eight days older when her mother returns. She’s still twelve when she allows herself for just a brief, fleeting second to believe that maybe things will be different now, the trajectory of this seemingly unshakable narrative will finally right itself. The wagon will get back on the dirt path, so to speak.

But she still understands naivety, as does she human behavior, so she’s sickeningly unsurprised when the wagon isn’t so much as getting back on track as her mother is falling off of it, spectacularly so. Her drink of choice the next night is a martini with four olives and salt around the rim and Rose locks herself in her room before the sun even sets. She sits with her back against the door and tried to drown out the sounds of her mother’s drunken dialogue she sometimes likes to take up with herself. She feels her chest constricting, feels her head lightening, feels her hands starting to shake, and for all her endless trawling through her treasured DSM-V, it will take a Rose years to see her panic attacks for what they are; for now, she takes much greater pleasure in psychoanalyzing those removed from herself: celebrities on the news, whackjobs on Dr. Phil, her mother clattering around downstairs. Soon, she’ll have a whole cohort of online friends to test her skills on—though cohort does feel an ambitious term at times when there’s only three of them—so why on earth should she waste time and energy on someone like herself?

Dave, Jade, and John. She buys the computer with her mother’s credit card and doesn’t tell her about it, hoping for retribution of some sorts, a tangible reminder that the woman downstairs still recognizes the duties she has to fulfill as her mother. No such punishment comes, but she meets the first proper friends she’s had in her life, so Rose figures it’s a fair trade off.

They are, though Rose would rather saw off her own leg than openly admit this, so deeply important to her, even from the get-go. John is happy-go-lucky in a way that makes her smile despite herself and fiercely clever and witty at times in a way that makes her deeply admire him. Jade’s positivity is endearing, and her capacity for compassion is so persistent and blistering, even despite the walls Rose tries to raise around herself. Dave is, if he asks, an insufferable prick; if he doesn’t, he’s probably her best friend and she knows, in some innate part of herself, that she would lay down her life for him without hesitation, should the occasion prompt it.

She’s thirteen and staring at the package opened on her bed: a set of knitting needles from John for her birthday. She’s thirteen and getting her first crush on a girl, an event she deems inconsequential and yet can’t stop thinking about for weeks. She’s thirteen and sitting in the hospital waiting room again. She’s thirteen and walking home before her mother wakes up this time, clinging to the pools of light the street lamps cast on the empty sidewalks like they’re lifelines. She’s thirteen and finding herself staying up until two, three, four in the morning talking to her friends. She’s thirteen and wondering why Dave has been offline for three days now. She’s thirteen and her mother is crying outside her door, begging for a forgiveness Rose isn’t even sure of where to begin giving. She’s thirteen and downloading Sburb for the first. She’s thirteen and sitting in the mausoleum trying to help John get out of his house. She’s thirteen when she enters the game and realizes, with a sick, slow sense of horror, that she will not come out the same.

The game is bizarre: calm and peaceful, with the sprite of her dead cat singing her songs about the ocean one minute—because go figure, really—and her fighting tooth and nail to not get ripped to shreds by the sorts of creatures she saw in her nightmares as a child the next. It’s disorienting and confusing and absolutely exhilarating—finally, a reprieve from the monotony and misery and stilted awkwardness of her home, the ever-unchangingness of Rainbow Falls, a satiation for the hunger for more she’s been feeling for as long as she can remember.

She begins to learn the game from the inside out, continuing her research from before. There’s always something more to learn, some greater understanding of this rapidly unfolding and evolving world around her, and for a while it’s enough. She enjoys this, stepping into the role as the liaison between the rules of the game and her friends—later, the trolls, too, because of course there’s trolls.

But there’s something wrong. There’s something deeply flawed about the role she feels herself slipping into. Something that reads too like complacency, too akin to the naivety she spent her childhood carefully working out of her like a stain in a t-shirt.

Simply put, she starts to get bored.

She plays by the rules and the world around her remains consistent, constant. She plays by the rules and learns that there is no point, that this entire notion of winning, of building Skaia, is a fallacy, an illusion. She plays by the rules and gets shit in return, so she alchemizes a pair of wands and gets a new wardrobe and decides to rewrite the game from the inside out. She plays by the rules and the game tries to break her, so she starts breaking it right back.

She stops playing by the rules and finally gets her reward in the form of contact with Doc Scratch. He is, she learns, some sort of off-beat commissary from Lord English and, to put it colloquially, a real tool. His overt condescension, backhanded answers, endless stream of mocking questions all make her blood boil, but she don’t leave him alone, and she refuse to let him leave her as well. This game is flawed, her and all her friends are backing themselves into a corner the shape of a doomed timeline, and her semblance of Earth as she knew it is crumbling with each day; what else can she do but hound him relentlessly? The worry from her friends—and some rather persistent trolls like Aradia and rather kind ones like Kanaya—goes right over her head, and she instead focuses her attention on the cue ball from her dreams come to life and finding the trip switch that will bring this game crashing down around her. She talks to gods, and they give her nothing of use, but it’s entertaining all the same. She talks to Kanaya, who gives her nothing but gentle concern—it makes her feel, amidst her rapidly derailing sense of detachment to anything, oddly tingly on the inside; in moments she is reminded of being thirteen on Earth and mesmerized by the girls’ laughs and smiles and the slopes of their shoulders and collar bones and everything in between—and ideas the metaphorical trip switch. She talks to Dave, who is overtly unnerved by her, and John, who is covertly so, and brushes them both off because they don’t get it and they never will. She slips into self-aggrandizement because it’s easy, because it’s her, because she is Rose Lalonde and thirteen years old and is going to bring this illusion of the Game to a staggering halt.

Defeat Jack Noir. The Green Sun. The Tumor. The pieces slot into place so well, aided only by the discomfort at the complacency of her home world that’s blossomed into outright distrust. A sacrifice—in the form of her own life, no less—will be a necessary price to pay. This is simply transactional: her life for her friends’, for the trolls’, for the universe.

She talks to gods and they talk back to her, spinning circles around each other. She talks to Doc Scratch and he answers in questions, egging her, prodding her, pushing her buttons. She talks to Jade and is given a cue ball to look into. She looks into the cue ball and sees blood, a pair of white slits for eyes, and her mother laying on the floor, dead.

And then she’s not Rose Lalonde, liaison of the gods, leveler of worlds, final destructor of Skaia. She is Rose Lalonde with her feet swinging far above linoleum tiles, Rose Lalonde biting back tears at the smell of vomit and vodka, Rose Lalonde sitting on the other side of the door, listening to another sobbed-out apology.

She is Rose Lalonde, and her mother is dead. And Doc Scratch, the tool that he is, tells her to ask the question that’s been building up in the back of her mind: are these gods she serves as liaison for good? Are the caring? Are they any more willing to her friends and her win—or, at the very least, survive—that the switchback, flimsy rules of the Game itself?

The ask and the answer. She has been wrong about many things recently, all becoming clearer by the day, but she was not wrong when she said that this game would work its way through her, swallow her one person and chew her up before spitting her back out an entirely different one.

She is a Rose Lalonde, Grimdark. She is Rose Lalonde and she is going to kill Jack Noir if it’s the last thing she does.

Some seer she is, not recognizing irony she so loves to think of herself as proficient in that’s virtually written on the wall: going after Jack is, indeed, the last thing she will do. Or, at least that particular iteration of her does; she’s learning quickly that this game plays fast and loose with the concept of death and its permanency.

She dies, but not before John, fighting at her side, does. His blood is the same color as her mother’s and Rose has spent an indecipherable amount of time trapped in this game now—she should really ask Dave, if she wasn’t so busy fucking everything up as much as humanely possible and also being unable to communicate in a comprehensible language—and yet she still thinks she will never get used to the sight of blood. It makes her stomach hollow out, her head swim, her vision tunnel until all she sees is Jack’s sleek, expressionless face.

 _Some seer you are,_ he seems to say as Rose stand there, chest heaving, her best friend’s blood sticking to her sneakers, the smell acrid and heady in equal parts. _Some_ _fucking_ _seer_. _Little_ _girl_ _is_ _given_ _the_ _privilege_ _of_ _speaking_ _to_ _the_ _gods_ _and_ _gets_ _her_ _friend_ _killed_ _instead._

Blood—too much, too much of it—starts to roar in her ears. She swears for a moment that Jack is smiling at her, mocking; this whole game, she thinks, is one giant stab at her, aimed to disarm, aimed to annoy, aimed to take what she loves and crush it between its giant, invisible hands.

 _Some_ _fucking_ _seer_ , she hears again, this time in her own voice, and lunges at him.

She doesn’t even come close to holding your own. She wakes up as a dream and with the new knowledge that her mission to the Green Sun really will be a suicide one; there is no extra life to expend on this process now. The sun will explode and kill anything within range and her literal molecules will be shredded to pieces before she even has time to see what’s happening. Oddly enough, Rose finds herself strangely apathetic to the whole notion. A necessary sacrifice. A necessary move. A necessary choice.

Dave doesn’t seem to think so. It’s been what feels like years since he and Rose have properly spoken, but she finds herself slipping back into the comfortable back-and-forth banter she keeps up with him, even if instead of his god-awful rapping or questionable taste in movies or repressed homosexual tendencies, the point of contention between the two of them is who plans to take the Tumor to the Green Sun to prevent the end of the universe and get brutally disintegrated in the process of doing so. Dave, her brother—because go figure, right?—will not relent, and Rose realizes with not a little sadness that he really means it when he says he wants to come with her. For a moment, it is so tempting to succumb, to give into his demands and allow him to accompany her, but Rose holds firm. Instead, she stalls and jokes and deflects and knocks him unconscious with a ball of yarn. She bites back tears and screams into her hands and stares into the abyss of space, trying to familiarize herself with it; it will be her final resting place, after all; there will be no body to bring back to bury. It feels oddly like her home back in New York: cold and expansive, something that not even all the frustrated, exhausted cries in her lungs could ever come close to filling.

Dave catches up to her. He insists he’s coming, insists she’s not dying alone. He’s her brother, he says, honing the point in even though Rose knows his grasp on the ectobiological relations that account for the inherent connection she’s always felt she’s had with him is shaky at best.

“Get off your fucking high horse,” he tells her, and it’s the angriest she’s ever seen him. “I’m not letting you do this alone.”

“You’ll kill yourself,” Rose reminds him, desperate, closer to pleading than she’s ever been. Her mother is dead, John came an inch away from the same fate, and both incidents were because of her. She can’t be responsible for this, too; not Dave, not her brother. “It’s a suicide mission, Dave. You won’t come back. There are no second chances here.”

“So why the fuck do you get to do it, then? What the fuck makes _you_ qualified to go get yourself killed? Huh?”

Rose isn’t sure how to answer that. She’s not sure how to tell him that all this years staring at the waterfall maybe weren’t about trying to understand her mother so much as they were about trying to understand herself and the explosion she will end in. She’s crying before she knows it; a stupid move, but naivety has always been a tempting trap to fall back on and Dave’s hug is warm and strong and asks no question and bears no judgement. He smells like smoke and salt and blood and Rose can feel his heart thudding against his rib cage as she presses her face into his shoulder. He is real, alive, breathing; after so many months of knowing him only as a screen name and a blood-red stream of irony and thinly veiled genuineness, being in such close proximity to the human behind all that makes Rose’s head spin a little.

“I can’t,” she tries to say; it comes out choked and raspy. “I can’t be the one to kill you, Dave. I—not when you have so much. I can’t do it to you, too.”

He asks what about her, what about the things she has, and Rose can’t answer that around the lump in her throat. She thinks of John and Jade who are, she hopes, blissfully unaware of what is about to transpire. She think of the trolls, of Kanaya; she is selfish, so selfish for wanting more of Kanaya in particular, for wishing she could simply put the Game on hold and speak only with her, battling it out through quips and jabs and verbal repertoire. She thinks, if there was the prospect of a future, if Rose’s tank was not running on empty, so to speak, she would be deeply, unreservedly in love with Kanaya, and maybe even be able to tell her so one day. She already is, really, but the notion of finality hanging so low keeps her from recognizing that fact in its entirety. But that’s not the case; Rose is staring death in the face and, before anything else, finds herself inexplicably sad that she will not be able to say goodbye to her.

“I’m coming,” Dave says again, dragging her back to reality. “There’s nothing you can do about it. I’ll tie myself to your fuckin’ legs if I gotta.”

“Please,” she whispers into his shoulder, fisting hands full of his cape. But in her mind, the childish fear of dying alone has already won out.

Dave accompanies her to the Green Star, and he holds her hand as they are torn to pieces.

Later she will learn that the mission was a trap, a plot she played right into. Had it not been for the necessity of the Green Sun, instead of the inherent harm Rose was told it had, she would’ve ended not one but two universes in the blink of an eye.

Some fucking seer, but it can’t matter too much. By fluke, she made the right choice, even if steps leading up to it were facilitated only by her childish desire to play god along side the others she spoke to. The cue ball from her dreams took shape; she reached out to grab it and missed, but perhaps that was for the best.

And the gods become inconsequential, too. Because Rose Lalonde dies at the Green Star with her fingers intertwined with her brother’s, heavy resignation in her heart.

She dies in a blaze of glory, of self-righteousness, of water and ice and snow and painful continuity. She dies a girl and wakes up a god.

And somehow, somewhere, Rose Lalonde, thirteen years old, the endless trajectories of the universe slowly unfurling at her feet, knows this is only the beginning.


End file.
